NIF announces five-book shortlist for the 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize for nonfiction

The New India Foundation has announced the shortlist of the 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize which honours nonfiction books about modern and contemporary Indian history. The winning author receive a cash prize of Rs 15 lakh.

The winner will be announced in November and the winning author will be in conversation with an NIF Trustee at the Bangalore Literature Festival on December 14, 2024.

This year’s jury is chaired by political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, and comprises historian Srinath Raghavan, entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, former diplomat and author Navtej Sarna, lawyer Rahul Matthan, and public policy researcher Yamini Aiyar.

The Jury said, “The 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize Shortlist highlights the rich and varied stories that shape India’s modern identity. From the critical decisions made by Prime Ministers and state political leaders, to the life and legacy of BR Ambedkar, from the cultural and social dimensions of Hindutva pop music to the complex tapestry of life and death in Banaras – these books offer a compelling exploration of the nation’s evolving history. Together, they deepen our understanding of India’s past and present by illuminating histories that continue to influence the country’s future.”

The shortlisted books are:

• How Prime Ministers Decide, Neerja Choudhry, Aleph Book Company

• A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, Ashok Gopal, Navayana

• Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir, Chitralekha Zutshi, Harper Collins India

• Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras, Radhika Iyengar, Harper Collins India

• H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Kunal Purohit, HarperCollins

Here are reviews and excerpts of the shortlisted books for this year’s Prize:

How Prime Ministers Decide, Neerja Choudhry

An excerpt from the book:

“I think I will just go to the hills and retire there, mused Indira Gandhi to a couple of visitors at her Safdarjung Road home.” Maybe I will take a small cottage somewhere in Himachal Pradesh, and write my memoirs.'

“After all, what are my needs?” she went on reflectively. “Mera kharcha hee kya hai (I don’t need much money to live)? I can live very simply.”

She was talking to Kapil Mohan and Anil Bali, who were from the well-known Mohan Meakin liquor manufacturing company, famous for its Old Monk rum. In the 1970s, they were known for their proximity to the prime minister. The Mohan family, networked across the political spectrum, had supported Mrs Gandhi since the late 1960s.

She sat with them under the jamun tree on the back lawn of the sprawling bungalow. The garden was green and full of vibrant colours in Delhi’s brief spring. But her mood was far from upbeat. She looked at the trees around the garden-she loved trees – the tall, sentinel-like kadams on the right and the solitary chir pine, arresting because of an unusual clump of foliage at the top.

But they seemed to bring her no solace. This morning in April 1977, it seemed that little would.

Until two weeks ago, Indira Gandhi had been the prime minister of India.

Today, she was not even a member of parliament. The Congress Party she led had lost the general election in March 1977. The defeat had come as a real shock. She had even lost in her own constituency of Raebareli – a stunning setback for a leader who had been hailed as “Durga” after she helped create the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. The international press had called her the “empress of India”.

The Indian National Congress, which had won the country its freedom and ruled it uninterruptedly for thirty years since Independence, was virtually wiped out all over North India. The Janata Party and its allies had swept the polls, winning all 345 seats in the northern states. On 22 March 1977, Indira Gandhi resigned as prime minister, a position she had held for eleven years.

Dispirited by her monumental defeat, she was now seriously toying with the idea of disappearing into the hills, and retiring from politics. “I will take a place somewhere, maybe where there are trees (all) around and a spring. I can spend the rest of my life there. And I can read books.”

“Madam, will you write a book?” the twenty-nine-year-old Bali asked excitedly.

“Maybe, but then who will want to read my memoirs?” she said morosely. She knew she had become a hate figure. The country had turned against her.

“Please look for a cottage for me,” she told Mohan and Bali. “I am very tired now. And I am fed up of this politics.”

A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, Ashok Gopal, Navayana

An excerpt from the book:

Ambedkar was born before the family moved to Dapoli, and according to him, all that could be said definitively about his birth was that he was born in Mhow, that the birth took place at noon, that he was a large baby and was born under the mool nakshatra, the 19th “lunar mansion” in Indian astrology, which is associated with adverse effects on parents. [Efforts to locate the house in which Ambedkar was born and convert it into a memorial began in the early 1970s but bore fruit only after more than three decades. A memorial in the form of a stupa was inaugurated in Dr Ambedkar Nagar (Mhow) by the BJP leader LK Advani on April 14, 2008.]

In a letter he wrote in early 1948 to Sharda Kabir (who married him in April 1948 and changed her name to Savita Ambedkar), he disclosed that he had consulted different astrologers to find out his exact birth date, and they all gave him different answers. In some official documents sourced by Vijay Surwade, his year of birth is shown as 1892 or 1893. The commonly accepted date of birth, April 14, 1891, is the one found by Khairmode in Ambedkar’s school and college records.

Ambedkar was a toddler when his father Ramji left the army, but the latter’s experience of serving in the army, which was shared by many other people known to the family, had an abiding effect on his son’s personality. Apart from a lifelong commitment to education, Ambedkar developed an interest in the Indian Army and the armed defence of the country. In the early part of his public life, he referred frequently to the Mahars’ military background and described them as a “warrior clan”.

In 1927, he visited the memorial erected at Bhima Koregaon near Pune. When open recruitment to the army was introduced during World War II, he urged Mahars to enlist in large numbers and successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Mahar regiment. Underlying these stands was a clear view on the choice between violence and non violence, which he spelt out in one of his first writings in English.

Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir, Chitralekha Zutshi, HarperCollins India

An excerpt from the book:

Kashmir’s distinctive identity and sovereignty could only truly be preserved, Abdullah believed, in the idea of the Kashmir nation, of which he became a faithful proponent. His narrative of Kashmiri nationalism carefully threaded together elements from Kashmir's narrative culture, such as its focus on Kashmir as a sacred space, with elements from Indian nationalism that emphasised transcending religious and sectarian divides in the name of united nationalism. From the pulpits of Kashmir’s shrines, Abdullah exhorted Kashmiris to think beyond religious community and envision the nation as a form of community that included multiple religious groups, all of which were suffering equally under authoritarian rule and economic exploitation. The only way to free the nation was for all groups to embrace secularism and join hands under the umbrella of the nationalist movement.

The multiple contradictions within this narrative haunted Abdullah’s career and Kashmir’s political trajectory in the 20th century. Although he claimed to speak for the entire state of J&K, Abdullah’s vision for the Kashmiri nation did not go beyond the Kashmir Valley. Key parts of the state – Jammu and Ladakh – were left out of its ambit, with their people never quite getting over their belief that Abdullah's nationalism came at their expense. And while Kashmir’s minorities joined the movement, they were never quite convinced that Abdullah’s turn towards nationalism and secularism was genuine, since he always presented himself as a devoted Muslim who believed in Islam as the sole means of spiritual salvation. But it was also Islam that, as he noted in a speech in 1933, taught him to fight for the rights of all his countrymen, regardless of their religious affiliation, and to protect the honour of his Hindu mothers and sisters just as he would the honour of his Muslim mothers and sisters. “I am Muslim,” he said, “but I see Hindus and Muslims with the same eye in worldly affairs and want them to live and work together happily.” His secularism, thus, was drawn from Islam.

At the same time, while he genuinely believed that Kashmir would prosper only if all communities were included in the task of building a free society, at some level, Abdullah continued to feel that Muslims deserved special treatment because of the discrimination and abuse that they suffered in the past at the hands of the state and its officialdom.

After all, his Kashmiri Muslim base felt the same way too; his supporters were willing to accept secularism to the extent of protecting and including minorities but not necessarily by sacrificing their own interests – for instance, by sharing government employment with Hindus or, indeed later, by supporting India.

As a result, Abdullah’s relationship to secularism and particularly the minority community of Kashmiri Pandits remained fraught. At a personal level, he worked closely with several Pandits, many of whom were a critical part of the movement itself and then part of his adminis-tration. But the community as a whole, he always thought, could be more amenable to thinking beyond its own interests to those of the nation as a whole. And since for most Pandits there could be no compromise on Kashmir as an integral part of India, Abdullah came to believe that they had played a key role in his dismissal from office in 1953. One of his Pandit compatriots, Kashyap Bandhu, described Abdullah years later as a man whose “conscience was Muslim, his heart was Kashmiri, and his brain was secular.”

Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras, Radhika Iyengar, HarperCollins India

An excerpt from a review published on Scroll:

Iyengar’s exhaustive account also points to other grotesque tragedies: Dom children often run between rows of burning pyres to steal the red chunri off of dead bodies which if intact, can fetch them ten or 20 rupees. There is the disturbing image of an economy that works on duping grieving families, but more darkly macabre is the picture of children who find themselves amidst dead bodies, all to ease a little burden off their struggling families.

What makes Fire on the Ganges a stimulating read is Iyengar’s refusal to treat people as substitutes for clean political puzzles. Instead, the book lends itself as a malleable medium for the expression of the full humanity of its protagonists – probing and sensitive by turns, it reserves its fidelity, firstly and most importantly, for the complicated truths that colour her subjects’s lives.

It is a credit to Iyengar’s genuine curiosity in her subject that these puzzles emerge with the clarity that they do, and her control over her voice shines through most clearly when she steps back quietly, never confusing direction for opinion.

H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Kunal Purohit, HarperCollins India

An excerpt from a review published on Scroll:

Purohit’s writing attests to a deep familiarity and long engagement with the Hindutva pop stars whose lives and works form the crux of his reportage. While all three are engaged in political activities that might be abhorrent to the average liberal reader’s sensibilities, they are never painted as simple one-dimensional caricatures. Instead, they come across as familiar figures, not very different from the vast majority of creators in today’s digital economy, their fortunes varying according to cycles of virality, constantly chasing the algorithm in an effort to stay relevant. Indeed, I often found myself unconsciously rooting for them, given that success is their only way out of small-town drudgery and dreariness.

Purohit paints this universe with journalist rigour and the occasional gesture towards novelistic technique. At one point we are told that an individual is drinking tea “from a stainless steel glass”, the kind of minor, insignificant detail that adds texture, and a dose of verisimilitude, to his account.

H-Pop is a triumph of the kind of “thick description” that anthropologists have long applied to faraway, indigenous cultures. Purohit turns the gaze inwards and emerges with a sobering realisation that Indian society, especially in its Indo-Gangetic heartland has been deeply radicalised and transformed, perhaps irretrievably, by the forces of religious nationalism.